How to Emulate a Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Jessie) on Mac OS X

Post by jimmies » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

hibby wrote: post #11

jimmies wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observation :) it's the raspbian arm build -- you are chroot-ing into the exact SD card that you put into the Pi. I don't know how exactly this sorcery works either. But I think chroot just "knows" that it needs to invoke qemu when it sees the binfmt of /bin/bash being arm.

If you read the script, it copies the relevant qemu binary on line 52 to the chroot's /usr/bin/. What's happening here is binfmt-support on the host has a path registered for arm binaries as the file you just copied to /usr/bin - whenever the chroot tries to run anything, the host directs it to this bianry which is your arm emulator :).

Post by kingosticks » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

jimmies wrote: post #4

On Linux, it's even easier (lol, who would have guessed?). I recently had the need to compile quite a bit of software to run on the Pi zero, and the ability to be able to "chroot" to the Pi on my PC has made the experience so much more pleasant. Everything compiles ten times faster! I also noticed that none of the available guides work well with Ubuntu 17.04 (and possibly newer/older), so I put together a simple scri…

Post by thisacctforreal » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

moyix wrote: post #8

pm215 wrote: post #2

I think it's worth noting that this isn't actually emulating a Raspberry Pi. The option "-M versatilepb" to QEMU tells it to emulate a VersatilePB, which is an Arm development board that's now a decade or more old. It happens that this can be set up to use an ARM1176 CPU, which is the same as the one in the RPi. So you can run a kernel built for the VersatilePB on a VersatilePB model, and use the same userspace/files…

Also (and I know you know this, pm215) you can actually emulate a Raspberry Pi 2 machine (i.e. the bcm2836 SoC) in recent versions of QEMU with the "raspi2" machine type. There are instructions that worked for me here: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/71172

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

jimmies wrote: post #4

On Linux, it's even easier (lol, who would have guessed?). I recently had the need to compile quite a bit of software to run on the Pi zero, and the ability to be able to "chroot" to the Pi on my PC has made the experience so much more pleasant. Everything compiles ten times faster! I also noticed that none of the available guides work well with Ubuntu 17.04 (and possibly newer/older), so I put together a simple scri…

Post by moyix » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

thisacctforreal wrote: post #16

moyix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also (and I know you know this, pm215) you can actually emulate a Raspberry Pi 2 machine (i.e. the bcm2836 SoC) in recent versions of QEMU with the "raspi2" machine type. There are instructions that worked for me here: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/71172

Any idea of a raspi3 machine type in the works? or where to contribute to one? It has a BCM2837, which has a 64-bit ARM CPU Core, and 400MHz VideoCore IV versus 250MHz in the raspi2. A comparison table can be found by searching "What is new" in https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Seeed%20Technolo...